This is a question we get asked often, why do you investigate at night?

Dave: There are many trains of thought on what time of the day we are best able to witness spirit activity. Many prescribe to the belief that the ‘witching hour’ of 12:00 am is the best time, although practicing witches do not acknowledge a single hour but a division of 12 planetary hours. Many prescribe that evil spirits are most prevalent at 3:00 am, which is the polar opposite of 3:00 pm; the time Christ was believed to die on the cross.

PPS believes that the haunting that is being studied should be investigated at whatever time the client reports the most activity. If we have a case where the client reports hearing footsteps and doors slamming at 4:00 pm every day, why would we wait until it is dark? We aren’t just going to investigate at night because that’s how all the TV shows do it. Most activity we have had reported to our group indeed happens at night, usually noted after the clients have gone to bed.

Probably the most beneficial reasons to investigate at night are that the site’s surroundings are quieter and less active. This affords the investigator less noise to filter out of audio and less movement in the area for video analysis. Subtle shadows and light events are more readily visible if there is less competing light and action; ergo the reason to investigate in as little ambient light as possible.

PPS, unless a daylight hour is cited as the most active, will schedule our investigations usually between a start time of 9:00 pm and leaving an end time open depending on the activity level observed and the amount of coverage completed. We need to remember that oft-times we are displacing family’s lives by investigating at night and to ‘kick a dead horse’ seems foolish. So when we fully believe we have completed our case objectives, we wrap up the equipment and head home.

Rex: There are a number of reasons the simplest one being the schedules of our clients. Of course we want to be there during the time that occurrences are reported to happen; but if you think about it, when are people home? mostly at night or later afternoon hours. If nobody is home then they can’t possibly witness any paranormal activity. As I said there are other factors including less human activity in the area (which makes evidence review a lot easier) and light sources being easier to identify. I think a lot of groups who base their entire investigative process on how its done on tv think that it has to do with some sort of magical nighttime element. Others are just looking for a thrill, and lets face it the dark can be pretty creepy. We listen to the claims of our clients and when the activity seems to occur and schedule our investigations around that time whether day or night.

On the right side bar of our web page we have a section for paranormal conditions including the phase of the moon and the solar x-ray. Today’s question is “In your experience does the phase of the moon or solar activity really affect a paranormal investigation?”

Dave: We have a pending case that states that increased activity occurs in relation to a full moon. There are many schools of thought on what geomagnetic parameters supply the necessary fodder for optimum paranormal activity.

We at PPS do not heavily rely on these conditions, as studies into the correlation or lack thereof are ongoing and inconclusive. We use the indicators supplied by the property owners as a better gauge of optimal paranormal activity (i.e. every time we have an argument, between 3 and 4 am every night, etc.). Is the availability of naturally occurring electromagnetic chow beneficial for intelligent (non-residual) haunts to be more active? I think that is a fair statement, but as we have learned, spirits seldom respond on cue, fully juiced or not.

There are proponents that believe that using a sidereal time component is a better indicator of primetime paranormal activity. Sidereal time is a determination of the earth’s position in its axis as opposed to the position of distant stars and instead of being a 24 hour day, lasts approximately 23 hours 56 minutes and 04.0905 seconds in duration. That is way too much math for me. There is a duality in our objectives for PPS investigations. Learn and advance studies in paranormal research and assist property owners with the phenomena they are experiencing, leaning heavily toward the latter. As our knowledge as a group grows, I am sure we will be better positioned to contribute to the findings of the research arm of paranormal studies. Until then, we will probably rely more on gut feelings (no jokes here guys) than inconclusive data.

Rex: For me this still goes under the category of an unproven theory. As with anything else we come across during our research we will document the current phase of the moon, solar activity and any weather conditions so that we can trend the data for common results. The moon has always been seen as a mystical force on nature affecting the tides and people’s behavior, because of this we cannot discount this theory. Hopefully we or another group may be able to draw a definitive link between the phase of the moon and the paranormal but until then we will continue to record our findings.

A lot of people believe that animals and children have a heightened sense when it comes to the paranormal. Do you believe this is true or are people just reading way too much into things our pets and kids do?

Dave: I thoroughly believe that children and animals are able to sense more than adults. I lean towards not thinking they possess a heightened sixth sense, but I believe their other five senses are so much keener. Children haven’t learned to take things for granted. Their natural inclination to learning their world is to see (and touch) everything. Animals can be entertained easily; dogs are fascinated by blowing leaves and a laser light will keep a cat busy for hours. Animals are not predisposed to analyze everything they sense and experience as adults are.

Part of our pre-investigative work is to ask about the activity of children or pets in the home. Often there will be marked responses from both in, or near areas of activity. It would be ideal to be able to as investigators, turn off our adult senses and get back to a more child-like state. But then we’d probably just can the investigation and watch Sponge-Bob instead.

Rex: We’ve all seen news stories about how animals act strangely just before a major natural disaster. Why wouldn’t this extend beyond weather or geological events and into other aspects of the paranormal? We get lots of reports about dogs/cats that won’t enter certain rooms of reported haunted houses or that they will follow or look at something that isn’t there. The problem is that we can’t ask our pets what they are looking at, well we can but we won’t get an answer.

Kids on the other hand can tell us what they see, if they are old enough, but this probably gets labeled under the “imaginary friend” phase and we ignore it. Being a new parent myself I am interested to see how I react when my daughter tells me that she has a new friend that only she can see. Will I patronize her and play along as if it is an imaginary friend or will I break out my camera, voice recorder and K2 meter. I guess only time will tell, and I have a few years before that happens.

Even though this was talked about as a joke on the April Fools day post, do you think that ghosts are around us all of the time? Could they be everywhere or just in “haunted” locations?

Dave:This is a great topic for debate. As stated in a previous topic concerning evps, I am a proponent of the “spirits are everywhere” belief. If you ask anyone where Heaven is, they’ll most likely look upwards and conversely down for Hell, but who is to say that Heaven and Hell are places and not just states of being. We are dealing with entities that are no longer in the physical, yet we continue to assert that they are in physical places with physical limitations. If, as many paranormal researchers believe that the soul lives on but just in a different frequency or state of consciousness, why couldn’t they be, not only all around us, but also within us?

That may explain the “chills” we feel internally on a hot day.

We have several evps that answer in an affirmative when we ask if the entity is in Heaven. Is whoever that is responding lying? Are entities able to communicate from Heaven, wherever that may be? Is heaven here around us? Who knows?

Physical life is all about choices; where we live, where we go, what we do. The same may hold true for the ethereal. If an entity remains within the area they occupied in life, it may be by a conscious choice to do so versus the inability to ‘move on’. We will probably never know for certain until we ourselves enter that realm.

Rex: I think we all have those moments where we get unexplained chills or the feeling that we are not alone, could this be because we are not, maybe. The amount of evps we have recorded in various locations with different levels of activity certainly seems to suggest that even if they are not around us all of the time, they could possibly come and go as they please. Of course this is still a theory and a hard one to test out due to the inability to command a spirit’s actions. Some believe that there are gateways to the next plane of existence in different places all over the world. If this is the case then maybe in those situations where we determine that there is no haunting but some kind of activity is present, maybe its just spirits passing through.

Today’s question was inspired by Barry from Ghost Hunters International. If you don’t know who he is, he is the one who speaks every language ever spoken.

Does it matter if you speak to a ghost in their native language? is it necessary to use only words that they would have known when they were alive?

Dave: I don’t know if I can answer this question with any firm belief. I hate to use other group’s theories without being able to substantiate their claims. So let me prefix that these theories are not necessarily those of PPS and by such we do not necessarily agree with them.

So here are some of the theories I have heard on the subject. There are schools of thought that believe that the verbal communication is not required from the spirits end. A telepathic type communication exists and even though we speak audibly, it is the thoughts we generate that are received by the entity. In this case, language is irrelevant.

There are more trains of thought that believe entities who have not moved on will respond to familiar language, people and events as they would have done in life. In that case, language differences may be a barrier to question and answer results. I would think this would more of a problem with entities which lived a long time ago as English was not as prevalent as it is today.

We, I don’t believe, have heard any language other than English on our recordings. We have had quite a few that had distinct British accents. That would lead me to believe that communication from the ethereal does retain aspects of their life. As we have not visited any locales that weren’t stateside, I guess we’ll never know until PPSI gets a show.

Rex: Logically it would make sense for a spirit to speak the same language after death. That does not mean that they still can’t communicate with you if you don’t speak a language that they are familiar with. The most common type of haunting is a residual, so odds are that whatever you are trying to contact may not even know that you are there. Residuals are basically just replaying the same set of events over and over again, and whatever was said during that event will continue to be said until the imprint is gone. We have tried numerous times to interact with spirits in a way that they may be accustomed to. At the children’s section of Cedar Hill we placed toys and spoke as if we were speaking to a child. We try to refer to our recorders as a “device” since a spirit may have lived in a time where recorders didn’t exist. Our case manager Jake even got on all fours and made cat calls to try to communicate with a possible cat entity on our last case.(your welcome Dave, that was for yesterday) We really have not had any conclusive evidence to prove that this method makes a difference, so for now we will continue to test this theory. Meow! Meow!